A COMPARISONOF STUDENT PERFORMANCE AND CONFIDENCE BETWEEN A TRADITIONAL AND A HYBRID THERMODYNAMIC CLASS

This paper discusses the student performance and perception of two sections of the Thermodynamics course, a challenging class for college level engineering and science major students globally and at the studied institution. Comparison of student performance was also conducted across underrepresented and non-underrepresented students. One section was held in the traditional face-to-face format while the other hybrid. In the hybrid section, lectures were delivered in recorded videos through online learning management system Moodle while study sessions, review sessions, and exams were held in person in a classroom setting. It was discovered that while grades of students in the hybrid section were higher their confidence on the topics learned was lower than the traditional section. The findings of this study suggest offering thermodynamics in the hybrid format is a viable alternative to the traditional classroom format.